Trout in the Classroom is an educational program for grades K-12. Students raise trout from eggs to fry, learn to monitor water quality and temperature and learn about basic ecosystems. Utah currently has 6 schools participating in the program.

Utah has 1500 Trout Unlimited members spread across 6 geographical Chapters. You can find information about your local chapter here.

Utah has numerous native fish and many of them are endangered. TU is committed to habitat restoration to bring these fish populations back. Find out more about our Utah Native fish here.

The inaugural Weber River Symposium, “Confluence 2014,” is scheduled for November 17-18 in Ogden. The Symposium is designed to bring together everybody who has an interest in the Weber River to highlight and strengthen this recent partnership and discuss how we move into the future. We invite watershed professionals, local leaders, and citizens who live, work and play in our watershed to attend this two-day event. Ogden City Mayor Mike Caldwell will be the keynote speaker for the symposium. We hope this symposium will stimulate further conversations about the future of our watershed.

The Weber River is an incredibly valuable watershed to the people of Utah. It has shaped the charismatic landscape of northern Utah and it is the primary source of water for drinking, irrigation, recreation and industrial uses. The Weber River also provides recreational opportunities, fish and wildlife habitat, and the cornerstone for current and future economic development. Over the past year, individuals representing cities, counties, water users, conservation districts, and private/state/federal agencies have collaborated to establish the Weber River Partnership and a restoration framework through the development of a Weber River Watershed Plan. The watershed plan considers a wide diversity of values, but this plan is not enough, the link between these diverse values is an annual forum where people can gather to discuss major conservation efforts, challenges and realities throughout the watershed.

(Info, pictures and video courtesy of Paul Burnett. Paul is a TU staffer and is the Weber River Coordinator for TU which is part of the Home Waters Program. This project wouldn’t have happened without his leadership. Find the complete article on TU’s site here.)

Fish Creek is a small tributary of Chalk Creek which is a tributary of the Weber River. Chalk Creek is one of the main systems with a dominate population of Bonneville Cutthroat Trout.

Sometimes we are left with a mess. I was recently talking to Charles, one of the landowners involved in our Fish Creek Reconnection project in Utah’s Weber River Basin. He was telling me about how his family was left with a serious problem. “People kept telling me that we needed to do something about this, but we didn’t have the resources to fix it. Besides, we wouldn’t know where to start anyway!” What was the problem? A culvert.

Not just a culvert, but over 100 feet of failing culvert with over 35 feet of road fill on top of it. In addition to that, the creek downstream of the culvert had downcut approximately 6 feet, completely blocking fish passage to upstream spawning and rearing habitat. Even if the landowners were able to move all that material and pull out the culvert, it still would have released a headcut to move up Fish Creek. Every time I drove over the culvert I just shook my head. How could something like this have been constructed. The problems were easy to point out, but a solution was much more challenging to find.

So what is the story behind this culvert? Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s there was an oil rush in Utah’s Summit County. Much of the development occurred on private land and there was little regard for the property owners’ operations or values that they held in the land, let alone things like fish habitat and passage. The South Fork of Chalk Creek and its tributary, Fish Creek, didn’t escape this fate.

At some point during this time period, the companies needed to access well locations in the middle of the Fish Creek watershed. The primary challenge at the time was getting the heavy equipment up the steep road grades, so they threw in a culvert and (literally) tons of fill over the top of it to cross the entire Fish Creek floodplain on a flat, but elevated pitch. Of course the oil boom has long since passed. The original energy companies are long gone and the landowners were left with this massive challenge.

A Weber River Bonneville cutthroat trout.

Why is Chalk Creek so important? This major tributary to the Weber River holds one of the last remaining Bonneville cutthroat trout strongholds, almost entirely free of nonnative fish, and Fish Creek is an important piece of that puzzle. Strongholds like Chalk Creek and its tributaries are special places that we can’t ignore because they serve as critical spawning and rearing habitat for native cutthroat. Protecting the health of tributaries like Chalk Creek has cascading effects downstream into the Weber River, providing enhanced fishing opportunities for anglers in this popular fishery.

After becoming aware of this culvert, TU staff reached out to the landowners in 2011. Unfortunately, by that time, the culvert was well on its way to complete failure. The floodwaters during that massive 2011 spring runoff event undermined the culvert and sadly much of the road fill fell into Fish Creek. Nevertheless, even after the failure, the challenges were just as daunting. The road provided ranch access to several landowners and one single section of culvert remained in place to hold the 6 foot headcut in place. This was a problem that no single organization or person could resolve, it would require collaboration.

A panoramic view of the culvert failure in 2011

In cooperation with the landowners and a broad partnership that included private organizations such as Orvis and agency partners such as the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, we developed the Fish Creek restoration project with 3 primary goals in mind:

Restore fish passage to allow cutthroat and other species access to 7 miles of upstream habitat

But the clock was ticking. By the time we removed the culvert during March of 2014, very little soil was holding it in place. Further failure would have allowed the headcut to continue moving upstream further into the Fish Creek watershed, contributing more sediment to Chalk Creek and degrading the already tenuous habitat in the Chalk Creek watershed. After extensive design iterations we decided on a restoration approach that included 4 constructed riffles that would step the stream down 6 feet over approximately 500 feet of stream. This natural channel design restored the connection between Fish Creek and its receiving water, the South Fork of Chalk Creek. When the culvert was removed last week, it represented a huge victory for the landowners, our watershed and fish living in Chalk Creek. With the removal of this culvert, 7 miles of Fish Creek were reconnected to the South Fork of Chalk Creek, building resiliency into our watershed and the native fish populations, and developing a collaborative win-win solution with agricultural producers.

We express our appreciation to the Gillmor family for their collaboration. Thanks to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Western Native Trout Initiative, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Utah Association of Conservation Districts, the Utah Division of Water Quality, the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District and Orvis through their 1,000 Miles Campaign for funding. Special thanks to McMillen LLC in Boise, ID for designing this project and Flare Construction in Coalville, UT for building this project.

It has taken a couple of years to make it happen but we finally have a new website coming together. Many thanks go out to Xmission in Salt Lake City for donating the hosting of our website. If you don’t know who they are, you should go check them out.

While all the pages are not filled and many things are left to be done, we have a start. Over the next several weeks we will be fixing issues and populating pages and hopefully making the Utah TU site much more useful to those to arrive here.